Ask Us about Early Modern History: Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution

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Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

Enjoy. This one is from the Shahnameh for Shah Tahmasp I.

Hollywood-style:

The whole thing is online on the metmuseum. Or at least it was somewhere when I pulled the images.

# ? Jul 30, 2014 19:25

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# ? May 4, 2024 12:15

King Hong Kong: Nov 6, 2009; For we'll fight with a vim
that is dead sure to win.

The Safavid and Ottoman chat is excellent, especially since the most exposure I've had to it of late has been in the form of job talks.

To add a question, what's the state of what we know about Ottoman, Safavid, and/or Mughal art patronage and are there any interesting book recommendations on the subject?

# ? Aug 1, 2014 05:58

Spiderfist Island: Feb 19, 2011

Hogge Wild posted:

Typical Ottomans. "Oh, God is on your side? Suck my (cannon) balls!"

I wouldn't be surprised if Selim the Grim said that verbatim. That guy made Ivan the Terrible look pleasant. It's probably good that he died of an infected pimple before he decided to order Suleiman executed (again) in one of his homicidal rages, but to be fair he managed to triple the size of the empire in just a 7 year reign.

# ? Aug 1, 2014 21:07

Testikles: Feb 22, 2009

King Hong Kong posted:

The Safavid and Ottoman chat is excellent, especially since the most exposure I've had to it of late has been in the form of job talks.

To add a question, what's the state of what we know about Ottoman, Safavid, and/or Mughal art patronage and are there any interesting book recommendations on the subject?

Talking about the Mughal's, The Mughals were big patrons of the arts. There are quite a few paintings from the Mughal period, books, and poems. For architecture you don't need to look much further than the Taj Mahal. One thing that stands out though is that they were huge fans of jewellery.

An emerald carve with a Shi'ite passage.

An emerald diadem.

This ruby is engraved with several Imperial rulers of the Mughals, reportedly a gift from Shah Abbas the Great of the Safavids to the Mughal Emperors.

How valuable is this stuff? The above necklace, if the website isn't a joke, is up for private sale for an asking price of 20 MILLION USD. It is undoubtedly worth more now due to the history behind it but the Mughals were definitely connoisseurs of fine jewellery.

A lot of it was lost during the invasions and break up of the empire. A gigantic loss was the legendary Peacock Throne: a gold and jewel encrusted palanquin looking thing. Nader Shah of Iran took it as a war trophy in 1739 and had it dismantled. If it had survived today, its estimated worth would be somewhere around 800 Million USD.

# ? Aug 2, 2014 09:24

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Testikles posted:

An emerald carve with a Shi'ite passage.

Is that a book cover? It almost looks like it has 4 latches around the edges for holding it on a book, or maybe a box or something.

repurpose it to be the world's most expensive ipad case :v:

# ? Aug 2, 2014 19:46

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

Must....not...post....about Mughal archery tackle. Ok, I can't help it.

One of 4 types of Indian bows: Crab bows!

Nm the text, it's wrong. Those bows were made until the end of the 19th century. There are many surviving crab bows circulating.

For size comparison, here a crab bow and a manchu bow from China.

Here an illustration, although this is only a representation of the strung bow, not the bow at full draw. Those are acutally really rare and we don't know how they should have looked like.

Here a reproduction by Lukas Novotny, one of the best commercial makers of hornbows in the world. The last 2 months I did research about these bows and compared angles and construction methods. The crab bows that he makes are toned down version of the originals, alot less reflex in the limbs and less sharp angles as you can see below. Those bows can actually be strung and shot by relative novice archers (Don't ask. It has to do with stability of the bow, not drawweight). Even you could pick one up, string it and shoot it, without ending up with the bow exploding or knocking your teeth out while stringing. The original bows have an angle between limb and ear between 90-130�. The less, the higher the braceheight, the less effective they will be. But how do we know that they needed to be braced that high, and why not lower? There is no surviving bow with marks of the string there.

So how do they look like inside? Like this. Since the sinew is gone from the limb, the reflex is also gone.

Ear to tip splice. In turkish bows the section where the ridge enters the flat limb is called "Kasan Eye", it is the thinnest protion of the limb, and it's also the most flexible part because of it. What does it do? I honestly don't know exactly from my own experience, because I'm not so far in my other bow. The ridged section (Kasan in turkish or Gushe in persian) is semi-working, it's an engineering feat, think of it like a lever that's a little flexible. This feature is also present in contemporary persian bows. It reduces the stress on the whole construction, while keeping the bow short, yet powerful. War bows made with a certain modification in this area can be strung for months without losing much power. Only crab bows have a splice here (because of the sharp angles you often cannot find a piece of wood that is grown like that, so you have to bend it with steam or boil it. Hence these bows are usually made with 7 splices, but there are also ones with 5 splices.). Is it flexible in these bows? It's a mystery!

These bows have an extremely high ratio of sinew (+5-7mm in 1,4cm thickness midlimb), thin and broad wooden core shaped like in persian bows, but a single very thin horn strip that's about half the limb's width, but the same thickness as the wood, about 3,5mm. The whole thing is then again wrapped in sinew, covered with an extremely thin silver foil in quality bows followed by varnish and then some more varnish. Why is so much sinew bad? It's heavier than wood, it makes the bow slower, but it stores more energy, you can give the bow extreme reflex. Interestingly Ottoman flight bows also had a higher proportion of sinew (also lots of reflex and also less horn), but these are made for extremely light arrows and not for war.

The right cross-section is from a crab bow, left a persian bow

On paper this looks like a complete poo poo bow. Extremely hard to make, takes even longer to season, unstable and requiring extreme skill to shoot. Oh, and it shouldn't be particularly great performance-wise. Well, they were still in use for war in the 19th century and co-existed for a long time alongside firearms. What do we know about Indian archery? Not much, not like we know about Ottoman or Chinese archery.

Here are the arrows that you shoot with it:

Note, I didn't put so much research into these arrows yet, but they have about the same parameters that Ottoman war arrows have, except, they're mostly made of bamboo. Comparable weight and length, etc. All this point to a bow with relatively high return speed, not something like I sketched. How was it done? Nobody knows. I found hints that point to a different kind of glue in certain sections and a fellow bowyer put forward the idea that these bows were conditioned in heat boxes like Ottoman flight bows, which alters the effectiveness of glue and sinew in the bow.

I will build one to find out! A reasonable close reproduction.

Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Aug 2, 2014

# ? Aug 2, 2014 20:57

Fizzil: Aug 24, 2005; There are five fucks at the edge of a cliff...

Has there been any specialist books on the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean/Arabian Peninsula? I'd really like to know, in the earlier period they came as explorers and traders, but later on took a more militaristic approach, introducing gunpowder, firearms and fortress building to the region (in fact Omani/UAE forts are based off that, it was unusual to have forts/castles built in the region). Although generally mostly found around coastal areas, recent studies (forgive my memory, but i heard it from a friend who attended a lecture about this) found they were a bit further inland, there is a story of them driving "heretics" from jabal hafeet, at the behest of the locals, and left them to their own devices.

Another point is that they evaporated around 1580 when the Spanish merged both crowns. I'm pretty curious how this set off their rapid downfall and abandonment of much of their colonies in the Indian Ocean.

# ? Aug 2, 2014 21:08

Testikles: Feb 22, 2009

Cyrano4747 posted:

Is that a book cover? It almost looks like it has 4 latches around the edges for holding it on a book, or maybe a box or something.

repurpose it to be the world's most expensive ipad case

I think it's supposed to go into a necklace or locket. It's actually rather small which is another remarkable thing about these carvings. It took a lot of skill to get that much detail into that small. There is a Quran out there that's solid gold frame, with white jade panels, and a flower pattern made out of emeralds and rubies. So they did do exactly what you're thinking of. I suggest getting into the jewellery business and market Mughal Style Ipad cases.

# ? Aug 3, 2014 09:08

Quift: May 11, 2012

does anyone know anything about the mughal empire and its diplomatic relations to the Europeans and the ottomans?

# ? Aug 31, 2014 09:39

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

You could probably find some info in Pratyay Nath's dissertation: MUGHAL WARFARE, 1495-1613: MODALITIES, LOGISTICS AND GEOGRAPHY. It's available online. Haven't read it whole yet, but it's better than nothing I guess.

# ? Sep 1, 2014 08:41

Silvergun1000: Sep 17, 2007; Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

I'm completely fascinated by the whole mercenary thing Italy had going on after the Hundred Years War, what would be some good books on the subject? I had a goon recommend Hawkwood: The Dastardly Englishman (which is the best historical book I've ever read, the first chapter on life and death is worth the price of admission), and would love to read more on the subject.

# ? Sep 2, 2014 23:06

HEY GUNS: Oct 11, 2012; FOPTIMUS PRIME

Silvergun1000 posted:

I'm completely fascinated by the whole mercenary thing Italy had going on after the Hundred Years War, what would be some good books on the subject? I had a goon recommend Hawkwood: The Dastardly Englishman (which is the best historical book I've ever read, the first chapter on life and death is worth the price of admission), and would love to read more on the subject.

Mercenaries and their Masters, Michael Mallett

Edit: Hawkwood: The Dastardly Englishman is 79 cents on amazon.de. Thanks for the recommendation.

HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Sep 2, 2014

# ? Sep 2, 2014 23:52

Silvergun1000: Sep 17, 2007; Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

HEY GAL posted:

Mercenaries and their Masters, Michael Mallett

Edit: Hawkwood: The Dastardly Englishman is 79 cents on amazon.de. Thanks for the recommendation.

Awesome, I'll check it out thank you!

Hawkwood is really a great book. It really goes into a lot of depth about life in that time, and both the good and bad effects that both the black plague and the Hundred Years War had on Europe, and tries to get into the heads of the people who lived through these events. Hawkwood's story is fascinating, but I think it actually takes a back seat to that.

# ? Sep 3, 2014 01:40

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

I was going to post some flowers, but reconsidered. Here's some dude assembling pikes:

# ? Sep 6, 2014 08:05

ArchangeI: Jul 15, 2010

Given the open fire next to the giant pile of gunpowder, I'd say that's a guy who is about to be in need of reassembly.

# ? Sep 6, 2014 14:21

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

all I know is that people back then knew how to motherfucking dress

Need to go out on a work detail? Ok, let me put on my skin tight red and yellow leggings and my awesome red puffy shirt.

# ? Sep 6, 2014 14:31

King Hong Kong: Nov 6, 2009; For we'll fight with a vim
that is dead sure to win.

I figured that he didn't get the memo that all black was the current style and got sent out to that death-trap work detail.

# ? Sep 7, 2014 02:01

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

You got it all wrong. It's Julius Caesar von Scheisshausen, the workplace safety mercenary.

# ? Sep 7, 2014 07:15

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

JaucheCharly posted:

You got it all wrong. It's Julius Caesar von Scheisshausen, the workplace safety mercenary.

That shits the OG neon reflective safety belt

# ? Sep 7, 2014 14:46

Grand Prize Winner: Feb 19, 2007

JaucheCharly posted:

You got it all wrong. It's Julius Caesar von Scheisshausen, the workplace safety mercenary.

Julius Caesar of the Shithouse?

# ? Sep 8, 2014 03:19

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

Ha, the joke is hard to translate? There are many villages in Germany and Austria that have "Hausen" in the name. The verb means "dwell" or "reside". The name Grimmelshausen is also familiar to you?

# ? Sep 8, 2014 08:03

HEY GUNS: Oct 11, 2012; FOPTIMUS PRIME

JaucheCharly posted:

I was going to post some flowers, but reconsidered. Here's some dude assembling pikes:

That's from Kaiser Maximillian I's Zeugbuch. So's this:

You can find more pictures here, of course: http://www.pinterest.com/karrostorling/landsknecht-asses/

But back to pikes, here's a picture of a guy gauging some, roughly 1540.

# ? Sep 8, 2014 11:00

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

That thing looks like the large version of an arrow straightener.

# ? Sep 8, 2014 11:32

HEY GUNS: Oct 11, 2012; FOPTIMUS PRIME

JaucheCharly posted:

That thing looks like the large version of an arrow straightener.

That's what a bunch of dudes on another forum said, too. So he might be straightening it instead of measuring it. That makes more sense for where his hands are, as well.

Edit: And once again the Bavarian State Library has put this online for free:
http://www.reenactor.ru/ARH/PDF/Zeugbuch_Kaiser_Maximilians_I.pdf

HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Sep 8, 2014

# ? Sep 8, 2014 11:37

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

I posted this in the Medieval thread and nobody responded, possibly because it's actually an Early Modern question, but why didn't the Holy Roman Empire become a centralized, coherent state like France did?

# ? Sep 14, 2014 08:30

Sexgun Rasputin: May 5, 2013; by Ralp
(and can't post for 679 days!)

is The Prince satire?

# ? Sep 14, 2014 09:55

HEY GUNS: Oct 11, 2012; FOPTIMUS PRIME

Sexgun Rasputin posted:

is The Prince satire?

Why do you think it would be? I mean, I'm aware of this interpretation (lol Rousseau :rolleye:

) but I'd like to hear your input on it.

icantfindaname posted:

I posted this in the Medieval thread and nobody responded, possibly because it's actually an Early Modern question, but why didn't the Holy Roman Empire become a centralized, coherent state like France did?

Nobody responded because Cyrano4747 and Archange1 are doing whatever it is they do when they're not posting on the Internet, they'll be around. Or, I think Cyrano4747 made some effortposts about the HRE earlier in either the milhist thread or the medieval milhist thread?

# ? Sep 14, 2014 13:21

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

I'm starting to think the dude is payed to effortpost here. What are you doing when you're not posting? Are you procrastinating, telling yourself over and over "just one more post and I'll start to study"?

# ? Sep 14, 2014 13:38

HEY GUNS: Oct 11, 2012; FOPTIMUS PRIME

JaucheCharly posted:

I'm starting to think the dude is payed to effortpost here. What are you doing when you're not posting? Are you procrastinating, telling yourself over and over "just one more post and I'll start to study"?

I haven't been in the archives for a week due to personal reasons, but usually if I'm not researching or doing contract work for professors I'm in the house where I'm staying with nothing at all to do. So I post a lot more than people with, you know, actual lives.

Edit: And, of course, crouching in a muddy ditch somewhere with a pike in my hands and a helmet that's too big for me, also that. But I didn't get a ride this weekend so I'm waiting for next weekend.

HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Sep 14, 2014

# ? Sep 14, 2014 13:44

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

I meant Cyrano4747. You on the other hand, are also very welcome. He posted pretty much lately and not just 2-sentence posts.

Power Khan fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Sep 14, 2014

# ? Sep 14, 2014 14:09

King Hong Kong: Nov 6, 2009; For we'll fight with a vim
that is dead sure to win.

icantfindaname posted:

I posted this in the Medieval thread and nobody responded, possibly because it's actually an Early Modern question, but why didn't the Holy Roman Empire become a centralized, coherent state like France did?

My research is related to state building so I'll make an effort post answering your question from the perspective of an early modernist who disagrees with a lot of existing state building theories later today.

# ? Sep 14, 2014 16:10

ArchangeI: Jul 15, 2010

HEY GAL posted:

Nobody responded because Cyrano4747 and Archange1 are doing whatever it is they do when they're not posting on the Internet, they'll be around. Or, I think Cyrano4747 made some effortposts about the HRE earlier in either the milhist thread or the medieval milhist thread?

I don't read the medieval thread actually :shobon:

# ? Sep 14, 2014 18:47

HEY GUNS: Oct 11, 2012; FOPTIMUS PRIME

ArchangeI posted:

I don't read the medieval thread actually

You should; it's awesome now that I'm there.

# ? Sep 14, 2014 18:48

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

Isn't this the Renaissance thread?

# ? Sep 14, 2014 19:25

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

JaucheCharly posted:

I'm starting to think the dude is payed to effortpost here. What are you doing when you're not posting? Are you procrastinating, telling yourself over and over "just one more post and I'll start to study"?

Pretty much. Whole lotta procrastination this past two months due to a particularly difficult bit of writing that's been kicking my rear end. Cranking out a fast couple thousand words on something that I can effectively explain is a big morale booster when you've been banging your head on the same paragraph for the last 4 hours. Those effort posts also don't take me that much time. Maybe once in a while I need to go flip through a chapter of a book to refresh my memory on some specific notion or idea, but for the most part I'm just calling them from the hip without anything in the way of revision.

The other thing is that I save everything I write that's more than about 500 words, along with the subject or question that prompted it. Those come in pretty handy later on if you need to work up a lecture on a subject or some other piece of writing. At the very least you've got the framework of an argument at which point you're really down to editing and sorting out citation if you're drawing heavily on this or that argument put forward in a particular work. So as much as it's procrastination, it actually is productive procrastination that's saved me time in other places in the past.

And on that note I'll go rummage around and see if I did do an effort post on the HRE. I think I do remember answering that basic question somewhere or other in the last few months.

# ? Sep 14, 2014 19:58

HEY GUNS: Oct 11, 2012; FOPTIMUS PRIME

JaucheCharly posted:

Isn't this the Renaissance thread?

Alles Erdreich Ist HEGEL Untertan

# ? Sep 14, 2014 20:04

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Hah, found it. Right there in my "misc writings" folder.

The original question that prompted it seems to have been about the emergence of modern germany in general, so there's a bit of stuff around the edges, although the HRE makes the bulk of the middle. Either way, the HRE needs to be taken in context with that other stuff, so it's worth going over when discussing the HRE and how it functioned in general.

I have all my usual caveats about what I do and the limits of my knowledge built into the old post, so I'll just drop it in its entirety:

Cyrano posted:

Briefly, on early-modern Germany in general and its emergence as a real nation in the 19th century:

To start with, it's important to recognize that there really isn't a time when Central Europe wasn't a major factor in European politics or European power structures. I should also say from the outset that a lot of the very latest scholarship is really challenging the old notion that it primarily existed as a vacuum, an absence on the geo-political map of Europe, between the fall of the Carolingian empires and the rise of a politically powerful Prussia. There is a lot of work going on right now that's re-evaluating just how important the Holy Roman Empire was and how much real power they wielded, especially compared to traditional estimations of medieval/early modern France and Britain which might have somewhat over-emphasized how centralized and focused they really were.

That said, it also can't be denied that the political landscape between the Rhine and the Vistula from the time of the Reformation to the eve of the French Revolution is fractious to say the least and didn't really lend itself well to projecting large amounts of power outside that region. For a whole host of reasons that I really don't want to get too mired down in - ranging from the VERY self-conscious meddling of powerful neighbors who didn't want a single, powerful state in Central Europe to the not inconsequential internal power wielded by the HRE and the Church - the process of dynastic and political amalgamation and (rough) consolidation of power that took place in England, France, and Spain never really happened to the same degree in German Central Europe.

This was not helped by the Thirty Years War. The impact of that can not be underestimated. Basically all of Europe trampled all over the region and settled their dynastic, religious, and political disputes in someone else's back yard for a change. Given the way that campaigning - and especially the provisioning of troops - worked during this period that was a real problem for the people who lived in the area. It was a demographic, cultural, and political disaster that probably compares better to something like the loving Black Death than just about any other pre-industrial war.

Finally, there's the Holy Roman Empire. This is a mess of a subject unto itself. If anyone has any specific questions about it I'll answer to the best of my ability, but please understand that I'm far from an expert on it. I do modern Germany, and my grasp on what's going on with the HRE is pretty strongly tied to that, so just about anyone who has done any amount of actual work on it is going to know more. I beg anyone in this thread who has worked on the HRE to pipe up and jot down some thoughts that are better organized than this.

The main thing you have to understand for the purpose of this narrative is that the HRE, while it certainly exercised very real power, exercised a different type and more diffuse form of power than we usually think of when we think early modern proto-nation state. One of the really big, important issues was that the dynastic power blocks which did begin to emerge towards the end of the Early Modern Period were not strictly constrained within its borders, had strong political and dynastic ties to powers outside its borders, and had concerns and ambitions of their own. So while the HRE acted as a weak unifying force for the patchwork of small principalities, free cities, and ecclesiastical estates that made up the region, these dynastic forces and the external alliances and responsibilities they had also acted as a dividing force, pulling the region apart from without.

These powers were roughly organized on a northern and southern basis. In the north you have the eventual emergence of the house of Hohenzollern as the regionally dominant power. From their home territory of the Electorate of Brandenburg they eventually, via successful dynastic policies, secured the rights to the Duchy of Prussia (which lay outside the HRE - more on that later) and a few minor states out west in the Rhineland. This gave them a strong East/West axis of power and influence that they would continue to expand on throughout this period, eventually dominating all of what we would today call northern Germany and Poland. Their Prussian holdings also complicated matters for HRE politics, as it technically made them vassals of the King of Poland, at least within their Prussian lands.

In the south you have something very similar happen with the lands held by the Habsburgs. Traditionally based out of what we would today roughly recognize as Austria they rather famously built an empire via intermarriage and political alliance that would eventually come to include most of the early modern Mediterranean world, stretching from Spain to southern Italy, and on through to the borders with the Ottoman Turks. Key to our story of German unification (or lack thereof), however, very early on they pushed east into Hungary, securing a second royal crown for themselves. For anyone who has ever looked at a Habsburg eagle before, that's why they have two heads and two crowns - it represents the dual monarchy and the fact that the family essentially ran two states, one inside and one outside the HRE. Somewhat similar to the Hohenzollerns in the north, they also were organized along a strongly East/West axis that crossed the borders of the HRE.

What this means for German speaking Central Europe in the early modern period is that you have two major dynastic powers, one in the far north and the other in the far south, that have major non-German dynastic concerns. Rather than dynastic politics forming a nucleus around which a proto-state can form (such as we see with the French, English, and Spanish kingdoms) German dynastic politics worked in the opposite direction, consolidating into two strong poles which worked to pull the region apart.

That's more or less the status quo in Mitteleuropa for roughly-ish 250 years. Then along comes Napoleon. I won't get into the French Revolution, the beginnings of modern nationalism, and any of that stuff right now. Just accept that it happens. What's important for the Germans is that both the Prussians and the Austrians - who at this point were powerful states in their own right - got their asses handed to them in a most humiliating way by M. Napoleon, who then proceeded to radically re-draw the map of Central Europe. He basically consolidated all of the pre-revolutionary crazyness down into 39 nations, many of which received family members or loyal generals of his as their new kings. This situation didn't last long beyond his inevitable defeat, but it did have a few major consequences.

After Napoleon most of the major powers of Europe came together at the Congress of Vienna to hack out a stable post-war order. One of the things that was recognized is that the HRE was effectively dead and something needed to be done with central europe. In the end they created a loose "German Confederation," which very, very quickly came to be dominated by the Prussians and the Austrians.

Herein lies the key tension of our story of 19th century German unity: once again, you have one hypothetical state with two major royal dynasties as strong poles of political power, both of which have major concerns outside of German central Europe. The Hohenzollerns still had their holdings in Prussia and Silesia which, while increasingly German, were still at best a mix of German and Polish from a cultural perspective and the Habsburgs - much diminished though they were from the heights of their power in the 17th century - still simultaneously holding the crowns of both Austria and Hungary. Hungary, obviously, was no more German back then than it is today. At the same time you had a general recognition that there was some kind of entity missing from the map of central Europe, a roughly Germany-shaped cultural and linguistic thing that didn't have a nation corresponding to it. This is not to say the region was homogenous in any way; even today there are hugely significant linguistic and cultural differences between, for example, the residents of Lower Bavaria and East Frisia to name two extremes. Even so, they had more commonalities than differences when compared to their French, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, etc. neighbors.

What eventually emerged were two basic ideas for how to answer this "German problem:" The "Big Germany" solution and the "Little Germany" solution. The Big Germany solution is what the German Confederation attempted. Basically you grab all of the German speaking lands - from the "Meuse to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt" to steal a rather appropriate lyric - and cram them into one state. Problem: there are Germans loving EVERYWHERE. Congrats, you've just created a single nation that reaches from the English Channel to the goddamned Balkans and has a dizzying array of non-German ethnic and cultural minorities in it, largely due to having to digest the Habsburg domains. Most people were rather skeptical of the ability of a country like this to stay together for long, and those who weren't were loving terrified of how potentially powerful such a large entity could be. How would you like to be the French and wake up one morning to find that instead of a bunch of sleepy little Rhenish kingdoms on your eastern frontier, none much bigger than Switzerland, you all of a sudden had a single nation with a single foreign policy and, worse, a single military that could draw on the industrial resources and manpower of half the continent?

The second solution was the "Little Germany" approach, which amounted to picking either the Hohenzollerns or the Habsburgs and running with them as the core of a German state, and pulling in as many of the peripheral little petty states as possible. This had the downside of leaving a whole lot of German speaking peoples outside of what was supposed to be the new German nation, but it had the very convenient upside of being a lot more culturally homogenous.

The German Confederation doesn't last long. On paper it kind of dribbles onward until the actual unification in 1871, but in reality it was a dead issue by the 1830s, and everyone recognized it was toast by 1848.

Something else happened after Napoleon, and that's the fundamental reorganization and reformation of the Prussian state. Starting in 1806 and accelerating for the next decade or two King Friedrich Wilhelm III, convinced by his advisors that the embarrassing defeats inflicted by Napoleon exposed some really deep and troublesome problems in his state, oversaw the wide-scale reorganization and bureaucratization of the Prussian state in a truly breathtaking series of reforms. This is a period of history near and dear to my heart, as this is when we see the true birth of that most quintessential of all German institutions, the state civil service. If you want to stick a pin on a timeline and say "here there be modern Germany, for better or for worse" this is probably where you need to do it. From tax collection to the establishment of public schools to the organization of the military, everything gets shaken down into something that a modern German would absolutely recognize from their day to day lives as opposed to being the tattered remnants of medieval and early modern institutions. Admittedly this is a highly compressed and essentialized narrative of a much more complex issue and series of processes, but as a snap shot it works passably well.

After that, everything just kind of flows downhill from there, and you can skim Wikipedia for the rest. The Prussians fight a series of wars with their German neighbors that has the net effect of kicking the Austrians (and, oh so conveniently, the Hungarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Czechs, Slovaks, and all the rest of the SE European Habsburg goulash) out of the new German state out while tying the lesser German powers to them. This creates a German-speaking nation with a single center of strong political power - Berlin - that then proceeds to get the last of the hold outs on board by goading a particularly idiotic French government into a war which rapidly coalesces into a Germanic military coalition under the Prussian banner and culminates in the declaration of a German Empire mere miles from Paris, at Versailles. Throw in a few decades of political consolidation, some industrialization, and you have the general map of Europe on the eve of WW1. Apr�s, le d�luge.

Note that this is all a sketch. There are huge bits missing. I totally skipped over the 1848 Revolution, for example, and not talking about the Frankfurt Parliament is probably a criminal offense. This is all a laughably brief compression of enormously complex and important multi-century processes into something shorter than your average wikipedia recounting of a single season of Naruto. That said, this is already turning into a bit of a block of text, so I'll save all that for any questions the three people who read this far have.

Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Sep 14, 2014

# ? Sep 14, 2014 20:05

Sexgun Rasputin: May 5, 2013; by Ralp
(and can't post for 679 days!)

HEY GAL posted:

Why do you think it would be? I mean, I'm aware of this interpretation (lol Rousseau ) but I'd like to hear your input on it.

lol why the hell would you want my input on it that is why i asked the question in the first place

it's been a while since i read about it but iirc machiavelli was 1. a republican who 2. hated cesare borgia and 3. was pretty upset about being tortured by the medicis. him writing a book for people he hates on a subject he's passionately opposed to in favor of a guy who was widely loathed seems kinda like bitter sarcasm imo.

isn't the other interpretation that he was a sad broken old guy trying to win his way back into the medicis' good graces by selling out the belief system he fought for his entire life? sad.

# ? Sep 14, 2014 20:06

Power Khan: Aug 20, 2011; by Fritz the Horse

Good that you can use these posts. My wife thinks I'm crazy, today she told me that she thinks that I'm combing the hair of dead animals. Sitting there for a couple of hours, combing and combing with glazed eyes...

It's actually sinew and I should be wearing gloves.

Power Khan fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Sep 14, 2014

# ? Sep 14, 2014 20:11

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# ? May 4, 2024 12:15

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

reading over that old Germany post note how stream of consciousness it is and unedited - I really don't spend too much time on those. I'd guess that took me an hour to crank out. Hell, I've got a whole paragraph at the beginning where I kind of hand-wave the HRE away and say I'm not going to explain why it never coalesces into an early nation state, and then I go on to explain a good chunk of that later on. There are definitely some internal contradictions in it that I'd have to work out if I was going to do anything serious with that as a document.

Also, re the HRE: I skim over a lot of the things that are really important for someone looking at early modern Europe primarily (rather than from a modern Europeanist perspective). The way the system of electors functions is pretty huge in keeping power dispersed and out of the hands of any single dynasty and needs to be part of any broader discussion of how and why the HRE did what it did.

The other thing that needs mentioning is something that I think either Archangel or Hegel mentioned the last time this came up, and it was how a lot of more recent scholarship is really reconceptualizing how we look at the HRE and what, precisely, it was set up to do. There's a fairly strong argument to be made that the job it was set up to do was simply different from how we conceptualize the nation state today, and that it did that job really damned well for over 500 years. I'll leave that argument to be presented by someone who's actually up to date on that scholarship, though.

Jauche: Seriously, that bow stuff you're doing is freaking amazing. If you're not already participating in the bow thread over in TFR you should string together (oh god pun not intended) some of what you've scattered around the history threads into an effort post on old bows. I know a lot of people would be interested in hell at that.

# ? Sep 14, 2014 20:22

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask Us about Early Modern History: Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution

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